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The rules of barrel racing, the only female-dominated rodeo sport, are simple. It’s the execution that’s hard.
From the March/April 2021 issue. The horse breaks out of the gate at a slanted angle headed for the arena’s right-side fence. Just as the animal is nearing top speed, more than 40 miles per hour, it meets the first of the track’s three metal barrels. The rider, who to this point has been speeding her steer with spurs and vocals, must stop her 1,200-pound partner on a dime and twist the horse around the barrel as tightly as possible without knocking the barrel down. It takes an incredible deal of skill and guts to orchestrate such an extreme reversal of momentum. The rider repeats the process with the remaining two barrels. The last turn sets the duo up for a straight mad dash toward the exit. Depending on the competitors’ ability and the size of the track, the whole performance can last as little as 14 seconds.
The Lege This Week: GOP Launches Election Crackdown
Welcome to the 87th Legislative Session. Since the last session came to a close in June 2019, Texas has been hit by an unrestrained pandemic and a crippling economic crisis—and now the fallout from deadly blackouts. Under unprecedented circumstances, lawmakers are faced with a number of urgent challenges. The Texas Observer is following along every step of the way.
Identity Is A Major Factor In Our Indigenous Affairs Reporting
It was a simple follow-up question, a final fact check to an already finished story. Marie Crabb, who identifies as Mescalero Apache, is running for city council in San Antonio, and appeared to be part of a wave of Indigenous women running for public office. In my capacity as an Indigenous Affairs reporter, I wanted to write about her historic run.
Indigenous Identity at the Heart of San Antonio City Council Race
In early February, on a warm, sunny day, Marie Crabb left campaign literature for her neighbors in the Lone Star neighborhood on the south side of San Antonio. She wore a black cloth mask and a casual outfit with grey sneakers. At one point, she stopped to notice a person in a motorized wheelchair driving over a rocky, dirt path where a sidewalk should be.
Black musicians were already struggling for resources and recognition before the pandemic. Now, they’re organizing and championing lasting reform in the live music industry.
In March 2020, after South by Southwest was canceled for the first time in its 35-year history, musicians in Texas began a challenging time. But none more so than Black musicians, who were already struggling for resources and recognition before the pandemic. For many of them, the last year presented both as an undue burden and an opportunity to champion lasting reform in the live music industry.
U.S. Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson, the first Black woman to chair the House science committee, talks racism and COVID-19 disparities.
From the March/April 2021 issue. In 1990, Eddie Bernice Johnson, then a Texas State Senator, told the Chicago Tribune that “being a woman and being Black is perhaps a double handicap.” Despite the challenges of working in a mostly white Legislature and Congress, the Dallas Democrat has broken many barriers in her nearly half century in government. When she won a Texas state House seat in 1972, now-Congresswoman Johnson became the first Black woman elected to the Legislature from Dallas. A registered nurse who began her career at the veterans’ hospital in Dallas, she was the first registered nurse to hold office in the Texas House, the Texas Senate, and, eventually, the United States Congress. When Democrats won control of the U.S. House of Representatives in 2018, the 85-year-old legislator and Waco native became the first woman and the first African American to chair the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee.
‘Truly Texas Mexican’ Bites Off More Than It Can Chew
From the March/April 2021 issue. Adán Medrano’s new documentary, Truly Texas Mexican, begins with a disclaimer: “This film may make you uncomfortable and it should.” For the next 90 minutes, Medrano, a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, tells the story about his community’s food—a tradition that was never taught or explored when he was at the institute. Medrano identifies as being Chicano and Indigenous to Texas. Over the course of the film, which will premiere on March 21 on Amazon, Apple TV, and Google TV, Medrano adapts his 2014 cookbook of the same name by meeting with Mexican American, Tejano, Chicano, and Mestizo chefs in an attempt to find the Indigenous roots of Texas-Mexican food (not to be confused with Tex-Mex).
Uninvestigated, Uncounted: How Justices of the Peace Miss Important Clues in Death Investigations
Janice Lee Wilhelm was dead in her blue recliner–that much was clear. The 63-year-old grandmother had leaned back as if to rest her legs, tucked under the afghan she’d crocheted. She appeared to be asleep, but blood had oozed from a bullet hole in her neck and created a patch of scarlet on the front of her pink T-shirt. She’d been shot in her Centerville home, but by whom?
The Lege This Week: Who Cancels the Cancellers?
Welcome to the 87th Legislative Session. Since the last session came to a close in June 2019, Texas has been hit by an unrestrained pandemic and a crippling economic crisis—and now the fallout from deadly blackouts. Under unprecedented circumstances, lawmakers are faced with a number of urgent challenges. The Texas Observer is following along every step of the way.
Nobody Warned Texans About the Public Health Risks of the Winter Storm
This story was published in partnership with Southerly. Sheletta Brundidge watched from Cottage Grove, Minn., as severe winter weather descended on her hometown of Houston in February. She worried that snow and ice could shut down power for days, and that temperatures could plummet, leaving Texans freezing in their homes. “I knew they weren’t ready for this,” she said. She pictured people using generators or running their cars in garages to stay warm, putting them at risk for carbon monoxide poisoning.
Textile Artist Diedrick Brackens Recasts Symbols of Life and Death in Texas
From the March/April 2021 issue. In Diedrick Brackens’ large-scale weavings, Texas is omnipresent. At times, the state is a place of rest and sanctuary; at others, it is one of dispossession and assault. Vivid scenes of care and absolution take place here, in turn intimate and devastating. Brackens, who was born in Mexia, a town 40 miles east of Waco, is an artist who is deeply concerned with Texas. For better or worse, it’s home.
‘Not Celebrating Yet’: South Texans Wait for Biden to Cancel Trump’s Wall
In an interview last August, Joe Biden made a pledge: “There will not be another foot of wall constructed in my administration.” It was the first time the then-presidential candidate made such a clear promise. On January 20, hours after assuming office, he took executive action to pause wall construction for two months, idling excavators and bulldozers along the U.S.-Mexico border. But Biden’s order did not cancel outstanding construction contracts, withdraw eminent domain lawsuits, or revoke the waivers of environmental and historic preservation laws that allowed the project to proceed without normal safeguards—leaving South Texans still fearing a border wall could soon rip through their backyards.
A Texas Agency is Defending the Confederacy
In 1908, the Texas chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy built a 15-bedroom mansion in Austin’s leafy Hyde Park neighborhood, a mile north of the University of Texas. Intended to house elderly wives and widows of Confederate veterans, the Confederate Woman’s Home, like similar facilities in other southern states, was part of the Daughters’ mission to create “living monuments” to the Confederacy, an effort that also involved erecting hundreds of Confederate memorials across the South in the early decades of the 20th century.
ERCOT Is Refusing to Release Records On How it Prepared for the Winter Storm
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas—the corporation at the center of the power grid failure that left millions of Texans with heat or power last month and dozens of deaths—is refusing to turn over records related to its preparation for and response to Winter Storm Uri. In a letter sent to Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office last week, ERCOT argued that it’s not subject to state open records law because they aren’t a public agency and have asked the AG’s office to rule as such.
Industrial Facilities Released Millions of Pounds of Illegal Pollution During the Winter Storm
When the lights went off during the winter storm last month in Galena Park, a city of 10,000 people on the east side of Houston, an eerie orange glow emanated from across the bayou that borders its southern edge as the refineries that line the Ship Channel lit up the night sky. Chemical plants and refineries which hadn’t shut down in preparation for the brutal cold of the February 15 winter storm, and the massive power outages it triggered, burned off thousands of pounds of dangerous and unprocessed chemicals as they rushed to shut down during the emergency.
The Lege This Week: Abbott Lets His Mask Slip
Welcome to the 87th Legislative Session. Since the last session came to a close in June 2019, Texas has been hit by an unrestrained pandemic and a crippling economic crisis—and now the fallout from deadly blackouts. Under unprecedented circumstances, lawmakers are faced with a number of urgent challenges. The Texas Observer is following along every step of the way.
The Texas Public Utility Commission’s Revolving Door Between Industry and Regulator
Public Utility Commission Chair DeAnn Walker became the most prominent Texas official to fall in the wake of the February blackouts, announcing her resignation Monday after growing bipartisan calls from lawmakers for her to step down. The Public Utility Commission (PUC), which regulates electric, telecommunication, and water services in the...
Loon Star: The Great Freeze
To see more political cartoons from Ben Sargent, visit our Loon Star State section, or find Observer political reporting here. After Texas’ electrical grid failed due to a severe winter storm the week of February 15, millions across the state were left without power and water. Lawmakers began to question what went wrong and who was to blame, holding hearings that featured testimony from the CEO of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), executives of the state’s biggest power companies, and the state’s top regulatory officials. But as Justin Miller wrote in his weekly Texas lege round-up, “that failure wasn’t limited to the energy sector. As the hearings illuminated, the governor, the lieutenant governor, the Legislature, and the regulators are responsible, too.”
Who’s Going to Take Responsibility for Air Pollution in Texas?
The chemical disaster at the Intercontinental Terminals Company in March 2019 was the beginning of the end of AJ Cole’s time in Houston. After thousands of gallons of a liquid used to make gasoline leaked out of a tank and caught fire in Deer Park, just about 15 miles from the skyscrapers of oil and gas companies downtown, a plume of dirty particulate matter and other cancer-causing toxic chemicals like benzene drifted through the air for days.
Dying Oil Companies’ Parting Gift: Millions in Clean Up Costs
This story is co-published with Grist. When Weatherly Oil and Gas filed for bankruptcy in February 2019, the company was walking away from several hundred Texas wells. Many hadn’t produced a drop of oil in years. Companies are legally required to “plug” wells that they’re no longer using to extract oil and gas by pouring concrete into all their openings and cracks; this prevents them from leaking fossil fuels or harmful pollutants into the air and water sources nearby. But many companies that abandon wells say they no longer have the financial means to do so, leaving government regulators on the hook for the cost. The problem is massive: There are approximately 2.1 million unplugged abandoned wells across the country.
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